Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754-1911

By Tom Glynn

On May 11, 1911, the New York Public Library opened its “marble palace for book lovers” on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This was the city’s first public library in the modern sense, a tax-supported, circulating collection free to every citizen. Since before the Revolution, however, New York’s reading publics had access to a range of “public libraries” as the term was understood by contemporaries. In its most basic sense a public library in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries simply meant a shared collection of books that was available to the general public and promoted the public good. From the founding in 1754 of the New York Society Library up to 1911, public libraries took a variety of forms. Some of them were free, charitable institutions, while others required a membership or an annual subscription. Some, such as the Biblical Library of the American Bible Society, were highly specialized; others, like the Astor Library, developed extensive, inclusive collections. What all the public libraries of this period had in common, at least ostensibly, was the conviction that good books helped ensure a productive, virtuous, orderly republic—that good reading promoted the public good.

Tom Glynn’s vivid, deeply researched history of New York City’s public libraries over the course of more than a century and a half illuminates how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Reading Publics examines how books and reading helped construct social identities and how print functioned within and across groups, including but not limited to socioeconomic classes. The author offers an accessible while scholarly exploration of how republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of “public” and “private,” and the debate over fiction influenced the development and character of New York City’s public libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reading Publics is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City that firmly places the city’s early public libraries within the history of reading and print culture in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Empire State Editions
• Release date: Jan 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780823262656

Tom Glynn

Tom Glynn is a librarian at Rutgers University, where he is the selector and liaison for British and American history, the history of science, American studies, and political science.

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Reading Publics

Reading Publics

New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754–1911

Tom Glynn

Empire State Editions

An imprint of Fordham University Press

New York    2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Glynn, Tom, 1962– author

Reading publics : New York City’s public libraries, 1754–1911 / Tom Glynn. — First edition.

pages cm

Summary: A history of public libraries in New York City before the founding of the New York Public Library. Most of these libraries were accessible through a membership or an annual subscription. Explores the private and public purposes of public libraries before the advent of tax-supported public libraries — Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6264-9 (hardback)

1. Public libraries—New York (State)—New York-History—18th century.  2. Public libraries—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century.  3. Subscription libraries—New York (State)—New York—18th century.  4. Subscription libraries—New York (State)—New York—19th century.  5. Libraries and society—New York (State)—New York—History.  6. Books and reading—New York (State)—New York—History—18th century.  7. Books and reading—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century.  8. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life.  I. Title.

Z732.N7G58 2015

027.4747—dc23

2014028080

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

To my grandmothers, Peggy Chapin and Vicki Glynn

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Readers, Libraries, and New York City Before 1911

1. The New York Society Library: Books, Authority, and Publics in Colonial and Early Republican New York

2. Books for a Reformed Republic: The Apprentices’ Library in Antebellum New York

3. The Past in Print: History and the Market at the New-York Historical Society Library

4. The Biblical Library of the American Bible Society: Evangelicalism and the Evangelical Corporation

5. Commerce and Culture: Recreation and Self-Improvement in New York’s Subscription Libraries

6. Men of Leisure and Men of Letters: New York’s Public Research Libraries

7. Scholars and Mechanics: Libraries and Higher Learning in Nineteenth-Century New York

8. New York’s Free Circulating Libraries: The Mission of the Public Library in the Gilded Age

9. The Founding of the New York Public Library: Public and Private in the Progressive Era

Afterword: Public Libraries and New York’s Elusive Reading Publics

Appendix A: Timeline

Appendix B: Map of New York Libraries, 1900

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A number of people have generously offered valuable advice and criticism over the years. I am especially grateful to Alisa Harrison, Ellen Gilbert, Andrew Urban, Paul Clemens, Peter Wosh, Thomas Frusciano, Benjamin Justice, Peter Mickulas, Susan Schepfer, Virginia Yans, Christine Pawley, Wayne Wiegand, and, above all, Ruth Crocker and Anthony Carey. I also wish to express my appreciation to my friends and colleagues at Alexander Library, Rutgers University Libraries, for closing ranks during my sabbatical and a number of short research leaves. Thanks also to the staff in our Interlibrary Loan Department, especially Rebecca Luo and Glenn Sandberg. They never let me down. Finally, and appropriately for a book on the history of libraries, I thank all of the librarians and archivists who helped with my research, including, but not limited to Robert Sink and James Moske at the New York Public Library; Maurita Baldock at the New-York Historical Society; Mary Collins at the Mercantile Library Association; Janet Greene and Angelo Vigorito at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen; Mark Bartlett, Erin Schreiner, and Edmee Reit at the New York Society Library; Maria Deptula and Mary Cordato at the American Bible Society; Carol Salomon at the Cooper Union; Sydney Van Nort at City College of New York; Karen Murphy at New York University; Jennifer Ulrich and Jocelyn Wilk at Columbia University; Bruce Abrams at the New York County Clerk’s Office, Division of Old Records; Thomas Knoles at the American Antiquarian Society; and Ryan Bean at the University of Minnesota. I sincerely appreciate their invaluable assistance. Without the help and guidance of these dedicated professionals, this book would never have come to fruition.

Early versions of Chapters 1 and 2 appeared as articles in Libraries & Culture in fall 2005 and fall 1999, respectively, and are used here with the permission of the University of Texas Press.

Publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the Rutgers University Research Council.

Reading Publics

Introduction

Readers, Libraries, and New York City Before 1911

On May 23, 1911, with nearly six hundred dignitaries crowded into the ornate entrance hall, and as less privileged citizens thronged the steps and streets outside, the New York Public Library officially opened its grand new Central Building on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street.¹ The event, in the words of the guest of honor, President William Howard Taft, inaugurated a work of National importance.² Accounts in the national press echoed his sentiments. The Independent, an influential journal of politics and opinion, described the opulent structure as a symbol of the modern idea of what an American library should be, and Harper’s predicted a new era of American life, an ultimate and Olympian generation directly shaped by the books collected there. The Dial, a literary periodical published in Chicago, noted enthusiastically that it was the greatest library event in library history, while the correspondent for a children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, reported that the building was as satisfactory as it is beautiful.³ During the week that followed, the harried staff devoted much of their time to crowd control, as a steady stream of approximately 250,000 members of the reading public inspected the marble palace for booklovers.⁴

The opening of the marble palace on Forty-Second Street was the culmination of more than a century and a half of public library development on the island of Manhattan.⁵ The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations was created in 1895, when the libraries bequeathed to the city by John Jacob Astor and James Lenox merged with a public trust established by Samuel J. Tilden. Before that time New Yorkers had access to a range of collections for shared reading—in some cases for free, more often for an annual subscription or a membership fee. This book is a history of those early public libraries. Some of them, such as the Astor, were major local institutions. Others—the Biblical Library of the American Bible Society, for example—were highly specialized and consulted mostly by scholars. All of them, however, were public libraries as the term was defined when the first such collections were founded in the eighteenth century; they were accessible, at least ostensibly, to the general public, and they were established for the public good. The chapters that follow explore the various ends, both public and private, that these institutions served in the city of New York before the creation of the New York Public Library. While most other histories focus solely on the modern public library around or after the founding of the American Library Association in 1876, this book begins in the eighteenth century and traces changes in the public’s understanding of the term over time.⁶ These shifts in meaning are an important part of the history of public libraries and public institutions and of readers and reading in the United States.

.   .   .

In 1796, when the state legislature passed the new nation’s first law governing the establishment of public libraries, New York City was a fairly small seaport town. Most of its thirty-three thousand inhabitants lived and worked near the waterfront at the tip of Manhattan. The land north of what is now Canal Street was still mostly undeveloped.⁷ Compared to later decades, New York’s population was relatively homogeneous, primarily of English and Dutch descent. Social, political, and economic leadership remained in the hands of a few patrician families from the colonial period, often related by marriage. Although New York was the most populous city in the new republic, it was not much larger than its nearest rival, Philadelphia. Moreover, Philadelphia and, to a lesser extent, Boston were the nation’s cultural centers.⁸ Manhattan was considered too preoccupied with commerce to appreciate culture. When John Sharpe, a local Anglican minister, tried and failed to found a public library earlier in the century, he complained that the Genius of the people [is] so inclined to merchandise that . . . letters must be in a manner forced upon them not only without their seeking, but against their consent.⁹

The 1796 Act to incorporate such individuals as may associate for the purpose of . . . erecting public libraries simply permitted private citizens to form associations—societies—to purchase and share collections of books. They were considered public because they promoted the public good, because it is of the utmost importance to the public that sources of information should be multiplied and institutions for that purpose encouraged.¹⁰ As late as 1850, when the Smithsonian Institution conducted a national survey of public libraries, its librarian Charles Coffin Jewett included all libraries which are accessible—either without restriction or upon conditions with which all can easily comply—to every person who wishes to use them and added that in this sense I believe it may be said that all libraries in this country which are not private property . . . are public libraries.¹¹ In the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth century, the Crown and, later, state legislatures and other bodies commonly empowered associations of private individuals to undertake what today are considered public functions. For example, in 1805 the state legislature incorporated the Public School Society to operate free schools in the city of New York. It was not until 1853 that a local Board of Education assumed control and the schools became public in the modern sense of the term: free to all, tax-supported, and managed by elected or appointed public officials.¹²

A number of important public libraries in the city were part of larger organizations and reflected the particular public purposes for which they were founded. For example, the collection of the American Bible Society aided the propagation of evangelical Protestantism, and the library of the New-York Historical Society provided material for histories of the new nation. More often, the libraries developed wide-ranging collections to encourage good reading and thereby promote the public good. The first public library, the New York Society Library, was established in 1754 and granted a royal charter incorporating sundry persons conceiving [that] a public library would be useful . . . to our said city.¹³ Its earliest surviving catalog, published in 1758, offered an extensive selection of titles in the sciences, theology, law, history, art, music, belles-lettres, and especially the classics. There was only one novel, an English translation of Don Quixote.¹⁴ Taken as a whole, the Society Library’s collection represented the broad range of knowledge with which a well-informed, enlightened gentleman was expected to be conversant in the colonial period and in the early republic. Such self-improving reading, in turn, improved society. An article from 1792 in the New-York Magazine or Literary Repository, On the Utility of Public Libraries, noted that the advantages resulting to a community at large in consequence of a general attention to education [are] too apparent . . . to need any comment. It emphasized in particular that of all forms of civil government the republican depends most on an enlightened state of society, [that] . . . its very existence is intimately connected with the mental improvements of its citizens.¹⁵

New York’s public libraries during the colonial period and the early republic were imbued with the civic values of republicanism. An enlightened, well-informed electorate was essential to republican government, but just as important was the intimate connection between mental and moral improvement. The security of the republic rested upon the morality of the people, and good reading instilled good morals. A supporter of the Mercantile Library Association, founded by merchants’ clerks in 1820, expressed the greatest satisfaction with its growing collection since in proportion as you enlighten your mind, you awaken it to the perception of moral beauty and the practice of virtue.¹⁶ Above all, republicanism exalted the commonweal, the common good of a presumably homogeneous public. New York’s earliest public libraries were intended in large part to uphold the republic, to promote the public weal. A member of the Society Library in 1754, for example, urged his fellow citizens to let the general good take the place of a contracted selfishness. He rallied them to invite the arts and science to reside among us so that with a united harmony of public spirit they might make war upon ignorance and barbarity of manners.¹⁷ The collections of the city’s earliest public libraries were founded as a means of self-improvement, but the improvement of the private citizen was intimately connected with the good of the republic.

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In 1822, a new constitution granted the franchise to all adult white males in the state of New York.¹⁸ The rise of Jacksonian democracy challenged elite New Yorkers’ leadership in cultural affairs as well as in politics, and in the decades that followed the cultural institutions they patronized become more and more exclusive. In 1825, with the opening of the Erie Canal, Manhattan became the gateway to the West, and its markets expanded at an unprecedented rate. By 1850, with a population of more than a half million, it was a major industrial city and the commercial emporium of a growing nation. The burgeoning economy created new opportunities but also increased economic disparities and engendered class conflict. At midcentury nearly half of the city’s residents were foreign-born, newcomers whose language, customs, and religion often seemed alien, even threatening, to native New Yorkers.¹⁹ In just a half-century after the state passed its first law governing public libraries, the city of New York was a radically different place from the relatively small republican town in which the New York Society Library had been founded. It epitomized the values that historians have associated with modern liberalism; it was expansive, commercial, democratic, individualistic.

One of the most important emerging industries in the city in the early nineteenth century was publishing. When the Society Library established its collection in 1754, all of the books were imported from London. With the introduction of stereotyped printing plates (1811), steam power (1836), and the cylinder press (1847), book production in the United States became faster and cheaper, and by midcentury Manhattan was the center of the national book trade.²⁰ In an article on the Mercantile Library Association in 1841, the New York Evangelist noted approvingly that the present age, however else it may be characterized, is one of reading. . . . Books have been multiplied at a rate, and produced at a cost, that renders them as well the source of instruction and pleasure to [even] the poorest. What the author did not approve of, however, and what increasingly drove the publishing industry, was the production of fiction. Novels, designed for amusement rather than profit, were, for most of the nineteenth century, considered frivolous at best and therefore inimical to the public good that public libraries were intended to promote.²¹

In fact, a range of negative connotations was associated popular fiction, especially earlier in the century. The crux of the opposition to novels in libraries, however, was the conviction that works of the imagination appealed to the emotions rather than the intellect. In 1840, for example, the New York Lyceum circulated a pamphlet as part of an unsuccessful attempt to establish a public library. It charged that nearly . . . all the public libraries [in the city] are composed . . . of works of a character unfitted to develop stronger minds, more enlightened reasoners, and better citizens. They circulated instead that light and trifling kind of reading which appealed to the feeling and not the intellect—the excitable, or spontaneously active powers of the mind. Citing reports of some of the French hospitals for lunatics, the pamphlet concluded that the reading of [novels] is . . . one of the standing causes of insanity. The Lyceum proposed to build a collection that excluded all works of fiction (except those of a religious or moral character).²²

Women were considered especially excitable, ruled by their emotions, and thus inordinately susceptible to the allure of the popular novel. They were assumed to be the mainstay of the many private, for-profit circulating libraries in the city that rented books to readers and in which, according to the Lyceum’s pamphlet, twenty-five to one [was] the proportion of fictitious to solid reading. An article in the New York Advocate, for example, referred disparagingly to the thousands of young lady customers who devour the contents of every new novel that appears.²³ This presumed nexus between gender and popular fiction is one key to understanding how reading was idealized in early public libraries in New York and elsewhere. Reading solid literature—science, philosophy, history, classical works—was rational and masculine. Reading imaginative works was frivolous and feminine. Nonfiction was self-improving and therefore promoted the public good. Fiction was self-indulgent, demoralizing, and private. The idealized public library reader reflected gendered values that distinguished the public from the private in antebellum American culture.²⁴

In fact, by midcentury practically all of the public libraries in New York offered a generous selection of recreational reading, and it was avidly devoured by men as well as women. For example, in 1850 more than 25 percent of the volumes added to Mercantile Library were novels. At the Society Library, from 1854 to 1856, fiction accounted for nearly half of the books borrowed by both male and female readers.²⁵ Because both libraries relied, in part, upon annual subscriptions to build their collections, they were, as the New York Lyceum pamphlet noted, to a considerable extent obliged to comply with the general requirements of their frequenters. Yet even public libraries that were free, such as the Apprentices’ Library, established in 1820 by the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, needed to lure readers with works of fancy, if only so that they could then be encouraged to read more substantial, self-improving literature. Just as important, in the age of the penny press, as newspapers, magazines, and paperback books became cheaper and more widely available, New Yorkers, even those of relatively modest means, could afford to purchase their own reading material.²⁶ Like the commercial circulating libraries, New York’s public libraries were obliged to compete for consumers of print in a dynamic, expanding market. As they provided more and more popular fiction to meet a growing popular demand, there was increasing tension between self-culture and commerce, between promoting the commonweal and catering to customers.

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In 1849, the City of New York revoked the New York Society Library’s tax exemption on the grounds that it was not in the strictest sense of the term a Public Library.²⁷ The library sued the city and lost. To make their case before the Superior Court, the city’s attorneys argued, in effect, that the Society Library was, like New York’s commercial libraries, a private, for-profit enterprise. They held that, because space in its building was rented out to various businesses, the library was used for the purpose of gain or traffic and therefore not a public institution. Significantly, however, the city’s attorneys concluded their argument with a fundamentally new definition of public libraries. The Society Library’s collection was not open to the free use and enjoyment of the public and . . . is not a public library.²⁸ This obscure legal dispute over taxable property reflects the beginning of a gradual shift in the popular conception of the term. Although the New York Society Library continued to refer to itself as a public library, in the decades that followed this seemed increasingly anachronistic. Certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, a public library was one that was free to everyone in the community.

One reason for the changing definition of the term was the establishment of the Astor Library. Incorporated in January 1849, shortly after the death of John Jacob Astor, and opened to the public five years later, it was, according to the terms of Astor’s will, free of expense to all persons resorting thereto. With approximately eighty thousand volumes, the Astor was at that time the largest library in the city and the second largest in the nation. Only Harvard College’s collection, developed over the course of two centuries, was more extensive.²⁹ Astor’s bequest to the city foreshadowed what Sydney Ditzion termed the big philanthropy of the Gilded Age. Earlier free libraries, such as the General Society’s Apprentices’ Library, were established and supported by the aggregation of relatively modest, individual contributions from well-off, civic-minded citizens. In the case of the Astor Library and, for example, the Cooper Union Library, founded by Peter Cooper in 1859, one man’s private fortune was devoted to the creation and maintenance of a major public institution.³⁰ Private funding, however, also meant private governance. The trustees of the Astor, chosen by John Jacob Astor and appointed in his will, made this abundantly clear even before the library opened. In their annual report for 1853, they declared that, although the extensive collection would be accessible to all, they only are the constituted judges of the proper mode of managing it.³¹

From the beginning, the management of Astor’s bequest was the subject of frequent criticism in the local press. In particular, New Yorkers were disappointed to learn that the library would not circulate any of the books for home use and that it would not be open in the evening, the only time when working people might make use of it. More generally, there was a sense that the library was not intended for the average reader, that there was a stifling air of reserve and repulsion that discouraged the reading public from frequenting it. One critic went so far as to charge that the Astor was not, strictly speaking, a public library at all but rather a private library to which outsiders are occasionally admitted.³² In response, Joseph Cogswell, the Astor’s first superintendent, dismissed such criticism as silly clamor. He explained that John Jacob Astor’s intention was not to create a popular library for the mere momentary gratification of the community but rather to serve a small class of the population, the men of leisure and the men of letters. Cogswell justified this exclusivity on the grounds that the scholarly tomes in the Astor would be used to write popular books for the masses. The library would serve the public good as a fountainhead . . . feeding the streams, which diffuse the blessings of knowledge through every dwelling, as well the humblest as the proudest.³³

The persistent complaints that the Astor Library was not a truly public institution were, in part, a reflection of rising class tensions in a much larger, more diverse, and more economically stratified city. By 1876, New York was home to more than a million inhabitants, half of them crowded into tenements in poor neighborhoods.³⁴ In the decades that followed, new immigrants from central and southern Europe seemed alien, inassimilable to native-born New Yorkers. During the same period, immense fortunes were made, and the city became the capital of a national elite. The word society acquired a new, exclusive meaning, denoting the families listed in the Social Register and chronicled in the society columns. New York society, reigned over by Caroline Astor, the wife of John Jacob Astor’s grandson William, increasingly looked for ways to set themselves apart from the lower classes and the nouveau riche. One way to do so was to document one’s family history. Older libraries, such as the New York Society Library and the New-York Historical Society, and new ones like the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, developed collections that allowed the elite to establish that they are the descendants of the . . . founders of civilized life upon this continent, not the hordes of foreigners.³⁵

Another means by which the city’s elite defined and distinguished itself from other classes was culture. Like the term society, this took on a more restrictive meaning later in the nineteenth century. Earlier, culture or cultivation was used more broadly to denote a general process of growth and self-improvement—practical, moral, and intellectual. For Caroline Astor and her circle it meant high culture, the ability to appreciate the beautiful in art, music, or literature. Assumed the exclusive province of the true elite, it was perhaps the primary means by which the Gilded Age upper class distanced itself from parvenus and the masses.³⁶ Around the same time, the wide-ranging, self-improving kind of culture that the New York Society Library had sought to foster in its earliest years became segmented and professionalized within the modern research university. At Columbia, New York University, and other institutions of higher education across the country, modern scholarly disciplines emerged, and extensive library collections were developed to meet the needs of specialized scholars. The Astor Library remained a valuable local resource, but it became less important as men of leisure and men of letters became professional academics.³⁷

Not everyone, of course, agreed that the upper class had a monopoly on the appreciation of beauty. A series of articles on The Poor Taste of the Rich in early issues of House Beautiful, for example, ridiculed the vulgar, ostentatious homes of wealthy New Yorkers, including society leader Bradley Martin’s mansion on West Twentieth Street. Lavishly illustrated, it described in scathing detail interior decorating that was a monument to ugliness, including libraries that are museums of costly furniture and . . . priceless volumes in gold and fine leather, but never book rooms.³⁸ More important, many civic-minded New Yorkers questioned whether, amidst the growing disparities of the Gilded Age, it was just or prudent to deny the working class access to the civilizing influence of culture. In 1886, with the advice and support of Melvil Dewey, then chief librarian at Columbia College, and several of the city’s most prominent citizens, the state legislature passed An Act to Encourage the Growth of Free Public Libraries. Unlike the Astor, the free circulating libraries that were established under the terms of the act loaned books for home use, were open in the evening, and welcomed New Yorkers from all walks of life. They were also publicly funded. The key provision of the law permitted the New York City Board of Estimate to make appropriations to each free library based upon the number of volumes circulated annually.³⁹ As a result, by the turn of the twentieth century there were twenty-seven small libraries, managed by fourteen library organizations, spread across Manhattan. These free circulating libraries later became the nucleus of the New York Public Library’s Circulation Department. They resembled the Astor Library, however, in one critical respect: Each was managed by a private board. The trustees of the free libraries expended public funds with no oversight from elected public officials. They were immune from what they considered the contagion of local politics, the Tammany bacillus.⁴⁰

Dewey and his fellow supporters of the free circulating libraries were inspired by the ideals of the public library idea. This meant not simply a collection of good books loaned for free to the public, but circulating the books from branches located in working-class neighborhoods.⁴¹ In these small local libraries the librarian was presumably better able to foster personal relations with readers, thereby guiding their reading and cultivating the masses. The buildings themselves, well lit and adorned with flowers and tasteful works of art, were designed to evoke the typical middle-class home and thus inculcate uplifting middle-class values among the city’s tenement dwellers. The role of the female librarian in the branch library was therefore essential. Women founded the largest and most influential of the city’s free libraries, the New York Free Circulating Library, and were the mainstay of the public library idea across the United States. Public librarianship was regarded as a natural extension of a woman’s nurturing, maternal role from the domestic to the public sphere. As such, like other helping professions that emerged about the same time, such as nursing and social work, it was considered a respectable alternative to marriage for an educated middle-class female. Similarly, women were seen as particularly well suited to librarianship because their innate feminine appreciation of beauty made them, to use historian Dee Garrison’s phrase, the ideal apostles of culture.⁴² The stereotypical image of the refined lady librarian thus contrasted sharply with an older, yet still prevalent stereotype of women as frivolous devourers of cheap novels.

The publication of novels increased dramatically throughout the nineteenth century. From 1825 to 1850, American presses published approximately sixteen hundred titles in adult fiction. During the last quarter of the century, that number had increased to nearly seven thousand.⁴³ Although the free circulating libraries collected far fewer novels than subscription libraries such as the Society Library and the Mercantile Library Association, they were by far the most popular titles, usually accounting for 50 percent or more of a branch’s total circulation.⁴⁴ Throughout the century the argument that librarians used most frequently to justify the provision of fiction was that it would attract readers to the library, where they would be exposed to good books and naturally develop a preference for more substantial works. In one of the earliest annual reports of the Mercantile Library, for example, the directors explained that a few of the best imaginative works are permitted, and these are at first oftenest called for; but the voice of wisdom has made itself heard, and many who were wont to devour the pages of romance alone have become readers of history and lovers of science. The free circulating libraries also collected fiction as a stepping-stone to better books, but by 1886 there was a fundamental shift in what was considered good reading. When the Mercantile Library was founded, literature (like culture) was a broad, inclusive term. It encompassed all learning or knowledge made available in print, including, for example, history and science, as well as belles-lettres. The librarians at the free circulating libraries defined literature as fiction of the highest moral and artistic caliber.⁴⁵ Their aim was to lure working-class readers to the branches with second-rate novels so that that they might develop a taste for literature. They hoped to cultivate the masses by fostering an appreciation of beauty, of literary excellence, in works of fiction.⁴⁶

This was the essential public purpose of the public library in New York City in the later nineteenth century. The librarians of the free circulating libraries, the missionaries of literature, sought to use culture, not, like some members of the elite, to affirm class boundaries, but rather to uplift the working class to their cultural level and thereby create a more harmonious, unified community. In a period of rising class conflict and sometimes violent labor unrest, there was certainly an element of self-interest in this. For example, Ellen Coe, the head librarian of the New York Free Circulating Library, at an early conference of the American Library Association warned her colleagues that in these troublous times popular ignorance is invested with terrors unknown before.⁴⁷ At the same time, however, the supporters of the public library idea were genuinely concerned about the plight of the poor in a modern, industrialized economy and hoped to promote good reading to mitigate class divisions and mend a fractured public. In this sense, the free circulating libraries can be seen as a Gilded Age effort to restore republican harmony and promote the public weal. At a meeting in 1882 to raise funds for the New York Free Circulating Library, one of the speakers called upon rich men [to] aid this work by bridging over the chasm between themselves and the less fortunate or wealthy classes.⁴⁸

In promoting the public good, the proponents of the public library idea assumed an irreconcilable conflict between commerce and culture, between marketing and the mission of literature. To employ crass business methods, such as advertising and catering to popular demand, was considered fatal to the elemental principle of the public library and the cause of higher culture. For example, the two largest free libraries, the Aguilar and the New York Free Circulating Library, both stressed in their first annual reports that they never advertised to attract readers to their branches.⁴⁹ By the end of the century, however, there was a dramatic shift in attitudes regarding the promotion of public libraries that was embodied in the modern library idea. As the trustees of the New York Free Circulating Library explained in their final report, the modern library idea embraced the tenets of the public library idea—the free circulation of uplifting literature from neighborhood branches—yet added a wide range of new and innovative services to the public, such as interlibrary loans and story hours for children.⁵⁰ It also included various methods of pushing the library. Arthur Bostwick, the first chief of the New York Public Library’s Circulation Department, was the nationally recognized exponent of the modern library idea. He argued that extensive advertising and other business methods were essential to the modern library because, like the successful distributor through trade, the librarian must obey the laws that all distributors obey and not sit down and wait for customers. By 1900, in the words of another enthusiast of the modern library idea, the public library had come out of the cloister and gone into the market place.⁵¹

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In 1892, the State of New York passed legislation that codified the procedures by which municipalities could establish public libraries. Whereas the statute of 1796 simply encouraged individuals to associate to procure and erect . . . public libraries, the new law a century later defined the term in the sense that we understand it today. It required that every library established . . . shall be forever free to the inhabitants of the locality and that they were to be funded by appropriations . . . levied and collected yearly . . . as are other general taxes.⁵² In New York City, however, the free circulating libraries still had no guaranteed source of income. The Library Law of 1886 permitted but did not require annual funding from the Board of Estimate. This changed in 1901 when Andrew Carnegie gave $5.2 million to build fifty branch libraries in the boroughs of Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Under the terms of his gift, the City of New York was required to appropriate annually at least 10 percent of that sum to support the newly created Circulation Department of the New York Public Library. As a result, practically all of the free circulating libraries were soon incorporated into the new public library.⁵³ If the Astor and Lenox libraries were examples of big philanthropy, then Andrew Carnegie’s private benefactions for public libraries were huge philanthropy. They were of a magnitude that could actually influence or even create public policy.

By the time the Central Building on Forty-Second Street opened in 1911, the New York Public Library had completed thirty-two of the fifty Carnegie branches. That same year, the Circulation Department loaned approximately 7,725,000 volumes, more than double the total for all of the city’s free circulating libraries in 1900.⁵⁴ That it was now explicitly a tax-supported institution, that, in the words of Andrew Carnegie, every citizen . . . now walks into this, his own library, effected a dramatic change in both how the public perceived the library and how the library promoted, pushed itself to the public.⁵⁵ Shortly before the grand opening of the Central Building, the City published Results Not Shown by Statistics in the Work of the Public Libraries of Greater New York. Consisting mostly of quotes from satisfied, supportive readers, the pamphlet highlighted the public’s sense of ownership. One old resident, a property owner was pleased that [I am] now at last getting something in return for money paid in taxes, . . . something worthwhile. Another user reported that she had stolen a book that someone left unattended in a local market, but immediately returned it when she discovered that it belonged to the public library.⁵⁶

Whereas the missionaries of literature who founded the free circulating libraries were concerned primarily with the moral uplift of the masses, Results Not Shown by Statistics emphasized the practical advantages that the New York Public Library afforded New Yorkers from all walks of life. It included enthusiastic testimonials from, for example, a gardener and a mechanic, but also a minister, a lawyer, and a physician.⁵⁷ Readers frequently referred to the economic advantages of a library membership, and some even calculated how much money they had saved by borrowing rather than buying their books. A drayman described how his reading had enabled him to qualify as a [driver], thus saving his position and increasing his salary when his firm changed from horse to motor delivery. A man who had once worked as a lowly clerk in a shoe store studied at his branch library and started his own electrical shop. He could not say enough good words for the public library which has made my life happy which otherwise would have been drudgery. Instead of moral uplift, the library stressed economic mobility.⁵⁸

References in Results Not Shown by Statistics to recreational reading also made it clear that the New York Public Library could be used for pleasure as well as profit.⁵⁹ Arthur Bostwick discussed this at some length in a talk before the American Library Association in 1903 on The Purchase of Current Fiction. Implicitly criticizing the lofty aims of his predecessor at the New York Free Circulating Library, Ellen Coe, he held that the recreative function of the public library has not been sufficiently emphasized of late. He even advised that in smaller branches with limited budgets, librarians should in some cases leave out a somewhat dull book of high literary merit and buy an entertaining story of little purely literary interest. Reading simply for pleasure was, in his view, a proper object for the expenditure of a considerable portion of such public money as may be received by the library. This more liberal attitude toward the provision of fiction reflected more extensive expectations of the municipal government on the part of the taxpaying public. In fact, Bostwick explicitly linked popular novels in the branch libraries to other new public services such as playgrounds in the public schools and recreation piers along the city’s waterfront.⁶⁰

The New York Public Library, however, was not a public institution in the same sense as the public schools or the public parks. It was not paid for entirely by tax monies. The city government supposed the Circulation Department, while the Reference Department was funded from the income of the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden endowments.⁶¹ Nor was it publicly governed. Its board of twenty-five trustees served for life and elected its new members, except for three municipal officials serving ex officio: the mayor, the comptroller, and the president of the Board of Aldermen.⁶² John Shaw Billings, the library’s first director, described this mix of public and private funding and governance as a partnership arrangement between the city and the New York Public Library.⁶³ This was and is fairly common for large public library systems. A survey from 1935 found that libraries in one of six large cities in the United States were not part of the municipal government.⁶⁴ Moreover, quasi-private entities performing public functions are a pervasive and distinctly modern phenomenon. The New York Power Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), for example, are both public corporations that serve millions of New Yorkers each day. The founding of the New York Public Library is an example not only of government taking on new, more expansive roles, but also its doing so in complex ways that confounded the distinction between public and private.

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Public libraries are institutions that connect and mediate between readers and books. Yet, the definition, the common understanding, of the term public library has shifted significantly over time. One way to make sense of their history in New York City before 1911 is to trace which readers they included in or excluded from the reading public and what kinds of books public libraries collected to serve the public good. In the eighteenth century and roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, the most common type of public library was a subscription library. Ideally, such libraries were public institutions because they provided solid literature—science, history, the classics—that cultivated public virtue and thereby fortified the republic. Readers who were not included in these reading publics were, most obviously, the poor, those who were unable to afford an annual subscription. Yet, women too, again ideally, were excluded to the extent that they were dismissed as mere devourers of popular novels. In practice, however, most of these public libraries even early in the nineteenth century collected and a circulated a relatively wide selection of fiction in order to meet the demands of their subscribers.

Increasingly after 1850, and certainly by 1886, readers expected a public library to be free. In New York City, the free libraries that were founded under the terms of the library law passed in the latter year loaned books without charge to any member of the reading public. The libraries were clearly intended for the working class, however, and by this period the emphasis had shifted from providing solid literature to providing fine literature. New York’s free circulating libraries sought to inculcate among the city’s tenement dwellers an appreciation of high culture, of literary and moral excellence.⁶⁵ By civilizing the masses—uplifting them to their cultural level—the elites who founded and managed the city’s public libraries in the later nineteenth century hoped to ensure public order and morality and restore a fractured republic by bridging the chasm between the rich and the poor. Women now played a critical role in the mission of the library because their presumably innate sensitivity and appreciation of the beautiful made them the ideal keepers of culture. Like the subscription libraries, the free libraries were obliged to collect and circulate popular novels in order in order to attract the reading public. They were regarded, however, as simply a means to an end, a stepping-stone to more substantial literature.

The New York Public Library in 1911 was a modern public library. Not only was it free to all residents, but it also had ongoing public funding and at least a degree of (all-male) public governance. Rather than the unlettered, uncultivated masses, the library’s reading public was now constructed as the middle-class, tax-paying public. Instead of self-improvement through an appreciation of high culture, there was a new emphasis placed upon the practical benefits to be derived from a library membership. Books could be used as a vehicle for upward mobility as well as a means of moral and cultural uplift. At the same time, there was a greater tolerance for, a degree of acceptance of, popular fiction. This was in part simply because the library was funded by the reading public and therefore obligated to at least accommodate popular demand. The New York Public Library was not only a new kind of public library; it was also a new kind of public institution. It reflected an expanded role for and the public’s rising expectations of government.

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The chapters that follow are in part local history. Although there are significant similarities, public libraries developed in different ways in different places. The differences between urban and rural communities, for example, are particularly pronounced.⁶⁶ The history of New York’s public libraries reflects and was influenced by, among other local circumstances, the city’s size, diversity, and especially its political and social reform movements. At the same time, however, their use and perceptions of their use over time shed light on the public and private values that Americans associated with reading, on shifting views of literature and popular fiction, and on how constructions of readers mirrored constructions of class and gender. Reading Publics places the development of the idea of the public library within a local and a national context and examines the various motives and values that influenced both those who founded and managed shared collections of books and those who read them. The history of these libraries is an important part of the social and cultural history of New York City and the United States.

1

The New York Society Library

Books, Authority, and Publics in Colonial and Early Republican New York

In 1754, a group of earnest young men founded the New York Society Library to advance the cause of learning and refinement in a small seaport town on the fringe of the British Empire. It was the first successful public library in the colony and one of the first in North America. As a public institution, its history from the colonial era through the early republican period mirrors changes in the ways that the public, and public and private activity, were conceived during these years. As a public collection, its development and use traces shifts in attitudes toward the kinds of knowledge that were regarded as socially useful and the bases of authority for disseminating such knowledge. The history of the New York Society Library through the 1840s thus sheds light on issues that were critical to the development of the United States as a modern, liberal society. Generally, it reflects a trend toward a broader, more inclusive conception of the public and a more democratic conception of public authority. Just as important, the history of the Society Library shows the ambiguities and tensions that arose as elite New Yorkers struggled to come to grips with these new ideas.

The Society Library’s founding and early years were imbued with the ideals of republicanism. Republicanism was and is a term that defies any precise definition.¹ It is best understood not as a formally articulated political philosophy but rather as a constellation of mutually reinforcing values.² The republican founders of the Library believed in the division of civil and religious authority, in the separation of church and state, and in the power of rationalism to dispel myth and dogma. They sought, to varying degrees, to break the bonds of hierarchy that tied individuals in a monarchical society so that they were judged on personal merit rather than the accident of birth. Above all, the founders sought to promote and safeguard the commonweal. They valued a public good that transcended selfish, private interests and believed that the Society Library served the public good by educating and refining a republican citizenry.

Although they were closely related in certain respects, republicanism and democracy, particularly for the founders of the Library, were not the same. Democracy was linked to liberalism, which celebrated equality rather than independence, individualism rather than the commonweal. During the complex process by which the country shifted from a republican to a liberal society, the character of the New York Society Library transformed as well. After the Revolution, as republican enthusiasm waned, it became progressively more exclusive. Although it had never been quite as inclusive as the founders’ republican ideals and rhetoric had suggested, in the nineteenth century the Library was increasingly at odds with and less relevant to the liberal, democratic society around it. Its largely patrician membership steadily withdrew from the active role it had played in the cultural and intellectual life of the city.

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The idea of a public library as it is currently understood—a tax-supported, circulating collection, managed by public officials and freely available to everyone in a community—is a relatively recent development. It was not until the 1840s that states began to pass laws permitting municipalities to levy taxes to fund libraries, and many towns and cities, including New York, did not establish a public library system until much later in the century.³ In the eighteenth century, a public library was public in the same sense that a public house or public conveyance was public. The term meant not that the collection was free but simply that it was available ostensibly to any member of the public, as opposed to one belonging to an individual or a closed, private organization such as a school.⁴ Moreover, in this monarchical society, as Gordon Wood has made clear, the modern distinctions between state and society, public and private, were just emerging. Aside from the military and the courts, government in North America and in the mother country largely acted passively, granting private individuals or organizations the authority to pursue public ends.⁵ This was in fact how all the American colonies were settled. In the eighteenth-century sense of the term, the first person to attempt to found a public library in the city of New York was Thomas Bray, a minister and missionary of the Church of England. A brief history of Bray’s library suggests by contrast the degree to which the New York Society Library represented a break from this premodern, monarchical world.

Thomas Bray was born in Shropshire in 1656 and graduated from Oxford’s All Souls College in 1678. He was ordained an Anglican minister in 1681 and appointed the Bishop of London’s commissary, or agent, to the colony of Maryland in 1695. Bray’s influence, however, extended to all of the colonies in North America. In 1699, he founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and in 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The aim of these complementary organizations was to foster piety and learning and thereby reassert the authority of the Church of England overseas.⁶ New York in particular was considered rife with ignorance and dissent. Although the Anglican Church was legally established, it was far outnumbered by the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed churches.⁷

At the heart of Bray’s mission to bring Christian enlightenment to the overseas plantations was an ambitious plan to establish a system of public libraries in every colony. Each was to be provided with three kinds of collections, organized by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and financed by pious and public-spirited clergy, gentry, and merchants. First, Bray promoted the founding of parochial libraries, comprising mostly theological works and intended for the private use of the minister in each parish. He considered these an essential means of encouraging poor clergymen to serve in the American wilderness.⁸ Next there were to be layman’s libraries located in towns throughout the provinces, circulating collections of books designed to promote morality and piety, entrusted to the care of the local minister.⁹ Finally, in its capital each colony was to have a noncirculating Library of more Universal Learning, for the Service and Encouragement of those who shall launch out farther in the pursuit of Useful Knowledge, as well Natural as Divine.¹⁰ The first consignment of 220 volumes for New York arrived in 1698 and was kept in the vestry of Trinity Church, the first Anglican church in the city.¹¹

Bray’s extensive writings to promote his library plan, in particular his enthusiasm for collections of universal learning, at times seem to mirror the expansive, critical spirit of eighteenth-century thought. In an unpublished manuscript entitled "Bibliothecae Americanae, or Catalogues of the Libraries sent into the Severall Provinces, he explained that the purpose of the collections was to give Requisite Helps to Considerable Attainments in all the parts of necessary and usefull knowledge . . . that great Perfection of the Rational Nature." Prefaced to the catalogs is an extensive outline of all knowledge, divine and humane, and brief descriptions of the types of books to be found in each type of library, including the bibliothecae provincialis. The collections in New York and the other provincial capitals were to be more than ordinarily furnished with books on all of the most useful of the humane sciences.¹² In reality, all of the Bray libraries were predominantly theological. In New York, of the 156 titles in the original consignment, 117, or 75 percent, were works of theology. The proportions were similar in the four other provincial libraries.¹³

There are also suggestions in Bray’s writings of a more modern, inclusive notion of the public that his libraries would serve and a more modern, meritocratic conception of authority over books and knowledge. In "Bibliothecae Americanae, he explained that the libraries of universal learning in the provincial capitals were intended for the use and Improvement . . . of the whole Country. In an essay titled Promoting all Necessary and Useful Knowledge, he held that learning does more distinguish the Possessors of it, than Titles, Riches, or great Places, that the Man of Understanding is . . . [more] inwardly and truly respected than he who may command the Cap and the Knee."¹⁴ In practice, however, Bray’s libraries served an exclusive public and were part of a hierarchy in which authority was legitimated by titles. Bray stated repeatedly in his writings that the books sent to North America were necessary to enable the church’s ministers to instruct the people, and this paternalistic relation is graphically illustrated in the bookplate of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that was affixed to them. It depicts a larger-than-life missionary on a ship preaching down to a horde of tiny but grateful colonists on the shore of the American wilderness.¹⁵ Moreover, the hierarchy of the Church was legally and theologically connected with the hierarchy of the Crown. In addition to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s bookplate, each of the books was also labeled on its cover, in capitals, "sub auspiciis Wilhelmi III.¹⁶ Further, the public that had access to the collections was by no means the whole country. In New York, when the titles of the first consignment of books were entered into the vestry minutes of Trinity Church, as prescribed in Bray’s instructions, it was stipulated that they were for the use Of the Ministers." There is no evidence that any layperson ever used the collection, and it appears likely that the books were kept under lock and key. Most of the other provincial libraries were also used only by the clergy.¹⁷

Bookplate of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

Bray’s New York library was augmented occasionally by local